


Tangled Webs

by Stormwind13



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Conspiracies, Dad Reaper | Gabriel Reyes, Dad Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison, Mom Ana Amari, Multi, Relationship is in the past, Road tripping through the past for answers, by about ten years
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-17
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-08-31 11:32:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8576857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stormwind13/pseuds/Stormwind13
Summary: It should have been nothing - a smirk and then a shot. But Ana had seen that smirk nearly every day for almost twenty years and for the first time in nearly a decade, she missed her shot. She needed answers. Answers she wasn't going to find staying with Overwatch. Except this time when she left, she had company. She wasn't sure how she felt about that.





	1. Chapter One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was for [Ora's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Finale/profile) prompt of 
> 
> "Sombra is very literally Jack, Ana, and Gabriel's daughter, created through science unknown to any of them"
> 
> So, here it is, several thousand words and several chapters longer than it was supposed to be

The first time Ana noticed it was during the middle of a fight, looking through the lens of her scope at the woman that had accompanied Reaper this time.

(She wasn’t sure if she was pleased or not that Amélie had not come. To see the young woman who had been so happy turned into… well, Ana was not above admitting she would rather never have to face the Amélie again)

The woman was dancing around Jess – no, McCree, searching for a way to get to his arm no doubt, as Ana lined the shot up when she smirked. Not much of one, barely visible, but Ana froze all the same, seeing for one instant another, younger soldier with the same facial expression before he did something to change a defeat into a victory.

McCree yelled and stumbled back and Ana fired, the bullet cutting between the two combatants and taking another Talon in the throat. She turned her attention to other enemies as the elder Shimada attacked the woman, keeping her away from McCree’s vulnerable electronics, and very determinedly focused on taking out everyone _but_ the young woman.

(She even took several shots at Ga – Reaper, in order to relieve her feelings – and didn’t try to think about how wrong it felt to be shooting at him. He’d recover)

*~*~*~*~*~*

Then Russia.

Ana hated Russia, hated the cold and the snow, and the fact that this was where she had lost her eye. Lost her eye to a woman that should never have been placed in that position, though Ana was sometimes unclear as to where she should begin to assign the blame to the woman instead of the brainwashing that made her who she was now.

But not for her eye.

Never for her eye.

The woman in purple was there again and Ana hung back, studying her through her scope, looking for a glimpse of what she thought she had seen in Paris weeks ago.

(She had cornered the elder Shimada before the mission and asked him to take point as the primary sniper. He hadn’t asked questions but she knew that he had mentioned something to Jess – McCree, going by the way that the younger man was shooting her suspicious looks)

The smirk was no longer evident as Lena harried her (few people could touch Lena when she was using her chronal accelerator and this woman was no exception) and Ana just watched the expressions on her face, taking in both skin tone and bone structure, the grip on her rifle growing tighter and tighter.

She finally took out the target (a delicate energy source that Talon wanted for whatever reason and Overwatch was determined that they not have) with a shot, setting off the fuel cell and destroying everything around it.

(Jack and Lucio had nearly been caught in the blast, but Jack had heard the shot and reacted accordingly and for just a few seconds it was like it was thirty years ago and they were fighting the good fight. A clean fight)

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

She skipped the post mission briefing.

(Lucio had spent the entire ride back to Gibraltar crammed between Je-McCree and the elder Shimada, both of whom chose to occupy their time by glowering at her.

Jack had hovered over D.Va when he wasn’t shooting her worried looks. Well, worried head tilts, since she couldn’t see his eyes behind his visor)

Jack found her at the dock that had been carved into the cliffs, sitting with her toes trailing in the water.

(This was her spot, just as the cliffs had been Gabriel’s and lone beach had been his. She wasn’t surprised that he had known she was here, when not even Fareeha had known about this spot. They’d been closer than family once upon a time. Now they could barely be in the same room as the others)

“What’s going on?”

She didn’t answer for several long moments, watching the current tug at her feet, pulling her out to sea. Jack stood behind her and she didn’t look to see if he was wearing his mask – she didn’t want to talk to Soldier 76. She wanted Jack. Had wanted him for years.

“Nothing.”

A long pause. A dangerous one, this time, but Ana didn’t speak again. To share her suspicions meant to share her burden.

Jack had too many burdens already. Some of them justified.

Many of them not.

“Don’t endanger them again.”

A warning and a plea that Ana could no more ignore than she could stop breathing, because she had never been able to ignore them. Any more than she had been able to ignore Gabriel’s own demons and fears.

“Not intentionally.”

It was all she could promise. All any of them had ever been able to promise.

She didn’t turn to watch as he walked away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you think. Please.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by skycode on Discord

She left that night, slipping out of the buildings and down to the dock again, where she had left the small dingy – it was enough for one and that was all that was needed.

“What are you doing?”

She stilled for a long moment before turning to look at the girl child standing behind her, fidgeting with a communicator – she hadn’t called anyone yet, Ana thought, if only because Lena had not appeared. Ana considered her in silence before finally speaking.

“To find something.” She didn’t say anything else, not wanting to give Jack any clues.

(Jack was smarter than most people gave him credit for, able to follow lines of thought and make leaps of logic that had left Ana and Gabriel scrambling to keep up. It had been Gabriel who had been the optimist, who had tried to see the best of people. She thought that was what might have broken him, in the end. He had never been suited for the shadows)

D.Va glanced at the communicator and then back at her, expression cycling through many expressions before finally firming. “I want to come with you.”

It had been many, many years since Ana had been caught off guard and she discovered that she hated the feeling now as much as she had then.

D.Va must have seen something in her expression because she hurried on. “You can’t just leave without backup –Winston said we had to go places in pairs.” She didn’t let Ana speak, barreling over whatever Hana thought she might have said. “And if I go with you, no one will think that you’ve just run off!”

Ana felt her eyebrow go up. “Do many people think I am likely to “run off”?”

She kept the question mild, but D.Va paled before answering. “Just… Jesse. And maybe Genji, some. And Lena, I think.”

Ana glanced heavenward before sighing. “Very well. If you’re coming, get in the boat.”

She sighed again as D.Va – no, she’d best get used to calling her Hana – hurried to the boat. Jack was going to kill her.

*~*~*~*~*~*

They went north first, with Hana huddling in the bottom of the boat, looking green. Ana steered the craft, hoping that there weren’t any squalls coming – their boat wouldn’t be able to handle any rougher seas.

(It wasn’t supposed to be in these seas, but Ana remembered two days huddling in the bottom of a similar boat, puking over the side in between trying to keep Gabriel from dying while Jack struggled to prevent them from capsizing. They’d both succeeded, in the end)

She abandoned the boat further up the coast of Spain and told Hana that if she must contact Overwatch, to be as vague as possible while still letting them know that she and Ana were alive.

Hana agreed and set about composing her messages while Ana went to secure transportation for them – Ana hoped that Hana could do as she asked, because she didn’t doubt that the woman, who was so good with electronics, would be monitoring their communications.

When she returned, Hana had tucked the communicator away and was more subdued, glancing around the nearly abandoned dock, their packs lying at her feet. Ana settled hers on her back and walked off, Hana trotting quickly after her.

“What are we doing?” Hana asked again and Ana sighed – she hadn’t interacted with the younger ones much, leaving that to Jack, since more and more she was finding just interacting with those she knew well exhausting, let alone those recruits nearly thirty to forty years younger than she was – but answered.

“To Madrid.” She paused and then elaborated further, “There was – is – an Overwatch facility in the city. And I have found that where there is Overwatch….”

“There’s Talon!” Hana finished, looking pleased, before she frowned. “But why couldn’t we have stayed at Gibraltar and followed up on this?” She fiddled with the straps on her pack. “Why didn’t you want the others here?”

The silence was longer this time – it had been nearly a decade since Ana had needed to justify herself to others or to explain the objective to a subordinate and she was out of practice – before she answered. “What I am looking for… is a hunch and not worth disrupting Winston’s research over. It is also something that cannot be hacked from a computer, so I cannot ask Athena to do it.”

“Why not 76?”

It threw Ana that Jack had yet to tell the others who he was – she knew, she suspected that Jess- McCree knew as well, and Genji most probably had known from the minute that Jack had appeared on the base – but she didn’t give away his secret. She had plenty of her own now.

“He has better things to do than give an old woman backup.” She gave Hana a sideways glance. “What will you do about your streams? Surely you can’t want to give them up.”

Hana refrained from answering when they reached the vehicle that Ana had found, waiting until they had started down the road toward Madrid before she answered. “I don’t. But I’m a part of Overwatch now and you’re a part of Overwatch, so I think that my fans can wait for a couple of weeks while we do this.”

Ana blinked. “You told them a couple of weeks?” She had not that that they younger woman would have thought that far ahead. In her experience, the young always seemed to underestimate how much time something would take, not overestimate.

Hana shrugged, looking out the window. “I thought you might be a while, since you were sneaking out without telling anyone. So I figured a couple of weeks and then reevaluate.”

Ana opened her mouth to say…what, she wasn’t sure, so she closed it again, letting the silence settle into the cabin.

(It was only a little strained)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you think!


	3. Chapter 3

Madrid was an old city and as such, it was confusing, crowded and made every one of Ana’s instincts go crazy.

(There had been a mission in Madrid, one of her first with Overwatch, even before Jack and Gabe. They had been clearing the city, block by block, and had come under heavy fire. Ana had made it out. Her spotter had not)

Hana seemed to love it, bouncing from one interesting sight to the next and Ana let her, since it was a little thing and worked to give them cover as tourists.

(Ana had come up with their cover stories on the way – Hana was her granddaughter, to help explain away the obvious differences in ethnicities – but didn’t wish to test them. Without her makeup, Hana was just another foreign tourist and Ana could have been one of the thousands of Middle Eastern citizens that congregated in the southern half of Spain. Nothing that should have been suspicious)

The former Overwatch base had been built in one of the older sections of Madrid, the UN choosing to shore up one of the older buildings instead of building an all new one and Ana, in her more bitter moments, wondered if it was because the UN wanted to keep them out of sight when they weren’t being paraded around like show ponies. Ana broke in through one of the side entrances, not wanting to use any of the older passcodes that were sure to set off alarms somewhere.

(The UN probably, Interpol most likely. Talon definitely)

Hana bounced ahead and Ana refrained from calling her back – she was nearly twenty and had been a member of the Korean military for nearly four years, not a civilian girl with no idea of how to behave. Still, she was the one that knew what they were searching for, so she overtook the younger girl and lead the way deeper into the building.

Deeper into the earth.

All Overwatch bases were built with the absolute minimum amount of square footage above the surface as they could get away with, Ana knew. Either because it was easier to make them low profile that way or because it was easier to contain a potentially hazardous situation when you could bury it under several dozen feet of earth, she didn’t know, but the point was that only the Zurich Watchpoint had been anything resembling the headquarters that the average civilian thought they had.

Their steps were muffled as they moved down the corridor and Ana mourned what had been – she had been a member for nearly half her life, the second in command for almost all of that, and to see what they had been reduced to…. It was nothing she had ever wanted.

“Ana…” Hana was behind her still, flitting from one room to another, peeking through the doors before moving on to the next. Ana let her – this was all offices and she doubted that anything classified was left behind. “…This is so creepy.”

(No, creepy was an old church with the crypts beneath it and her entire team searching through every tunnel to be sure that all of the Omnics were cleared out. At least the ghosts that reside in the Watchpoints were invisible)

Ana led the way down to one of the lower levels (not the lowest levels, those were reserved for experiments and the training rooms) and found what she was looking for –the infirmary and, hopefully, some of the medical files that she knew all of the Watchpoints carried with them.

(That had been Jack’s paranoia talking, an insistence on having most of the medical files have hard copy backups and a majority of the basic information be kept only on hard copies or on computers not connected to any network. The doctors and medics had complained, saying it made their jobs harder, but Jack had been adamant and Gabrielle had backed him up, that one time. So, here they were)

“What are we looking for?” Hana had moved ahead, now that they were in the medical wing, and was headed straight towards where the main office would have been.

Ana moved towards the room behind it – perhaps the doctors here had kept some of the records in their personal domains but she knew that most of the files would be in the rooms set further back. “Personnel files. Any ones that are relevant, I want you to package up and we’ll take them with us.”

Hana nodded and ducked into the office – Ana wasn’t surprised that she went straight for the computer – and Ana opened the door to what should have been a records room. It had been, once upon a time, but the flashlight she was holding revealed that someone in the last five years had completely ransacked it, overturning filing cabinets and scattering folders around the room, leaving no way to quickly locate any sort of information.

She sighed in annoyance and knelt down to begin to clean up the papers – they didn’t have the time to organize all of them, but unless whoever had done this had been very thorough, most of the papers should be within the vicinity of their original cabinet.

It took her less than two minutes to discover that whoever had done this _had_ been very thorough.

Still, until Hana came in to tell her the younger woman’s progress, Ana would organize as best she was able, to try and salvage something, since she knew that Angela was having to start nearly from scratch with the new Overwatch’s medical files.

Most of the agents she discovered she didn’t know – towards the end, before she had gone into hiding, she had spent most of her time running around putting out fires that required attention but that Jack and Gabriel were too busy to be take care of.

_“Ana please.” Jack had looked so tired then and Ana had pressed her fingers against the screen almost involuntarily. She’d been in South Africa, helping to set up a new Watchpoint and helping the new Watchpoint commander – a woman from Egypt, because none of the South African agents that they had were ready for the responsibility of running an entire command, and it was causing resentment – get settled. Jack continued, “I know you’re busy and that Fareeha’s birthday is coming. But I need you in Russia. We don’t have another sniper that can do it.”_

_“What of Gabriel? Surely one of his men….?” She trailed off, letting her fingers drop, as Jack grimaced and ran a hand down his face._

_“He says any of the ones that are good enough are already busy.” He sounded annoyed and frustrated. “Which was something I needed to know before I ordered him to turn over his files.”_

_“Jack….” Ana couldn’t help the warning in her voice. Gabriel might live for Blackwatch, content with his work in the shadows, but she knew that he resented it when she or Jack used their technically superior positions to order something that he would have given if asked._

_“I know.” Jack sighed, all of the frustration of the last decade in that one breath. “I know.”_

_“Will I have my favorite spotter?” Ana tried to keep her voice as light as possible – scolding Jack would do no good with an entire continent and a half between them._

_“No.” Jack’s voice was tinged with regret. “I sent him and Genji on a milk run to Watchpoint: San Juan. They’re not going to be back until next week.” His mouth twisted. “I think Jesse’s upset with me about my argument with Gabe.”_

_“When this is over.” She said finally, firmly, not wanting him to forget. “When I return from Russia, we will sit down, the three of us, and figure out where we have gone wrong.”_

_Jack gave her a wan smile. “Yeah. Gabe’s  PT test is coming up, isn’t it?”_

She shook herself out of the memory and absently tapped the papers to neaten them out, looking at the names.

Mendoza, Antonio

Mendoza, Sara

At least she was in somewhat the right spot.

She set them off to the side, in the larger stack she was accumulating to burn. When they left, she was going to torch the room and destroy everything in it – even if these agents were no longer part of Overwatch (and they had not answered the call, either for personal reasons or because they could not, Ana didn’t know, but she made a note to have Winston follow up with those agents that hadn’t reappeared) they deserved to be as protected as they could be.

So, she would destroy what she could.

She had managed to find the “N” section (it had been a long shot that there would be any information here, as none of the three of them had ever spent much time in Madrid, certainly not enough time to have had a medical file created when both Gibraltar and Zurich were so close) when Hana reappeared, holding up a flash drive.

“I downloaded all of the information in the files and then trashed the computer as much as possible.” Hana paused and took in the state of the room. “Did you find what you were looking for?” She didn’t bother to hide the skepticism in her voice.

“No.” Ana stood. “Bring the computer in here and then help me find the engineering rooms.”

If the medical wing had been left as intact as it was in the rush to shut Overwatch down, there was a very good chance that the engineering rooms had also been left mostly intact. Including their supply of highly, highly flammable containers.

They had been and Ana grimly doused the entire room first with coolant used for the machines and then with the oil for the metal as Hana carefully rolled several canisters of oxygen in from both the medical supplies and machine shops.

Hana was the one to light the match and they fled, Ana stopping only to make sure that all of the exits were sealed behind them – the fire would eventually die from lack of oxygen, but not before the paper and computers were so much charcoal.

She and Hana stayed in the area for a few hours, just in case – she didn’t want to endanger the people living in the surrounding area and she wanted to be sure that there wasn’t any sign that the Watchpoint had been tampered with.

Better for no one to know what they were doing as long as possible.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*

“Now what?” Hana didn’t look up from her phone as she asked the question and Ana resolutely didn’t look over to see what the younger woman was doing – as much as she knew that Hana was a member of the Korean military, she was also D.Va, who was a celebrity and a constant presence online.

Ana had never been impressed with celebrities, but Jack had taken the younger woman under his wing and he wouldn’t have done that if the girl hadn’t had more than two brain cells to rub together.

Jack had never had much patience for stupidity or vapidness.

Ana hesitated, thinking it over. There were several hundred former Overwatch bases scattered throughout the world, most of which had been left to decay on their own with only a few being repurposed by the local governments. She could count the number of true Blackwatch bases on two hands and have fingers left over. There was one in Lisbon, another in Rome. She would have immediately said Zurich, the one base where all three of them had spent the most time in each other’s presence, if not for the fact it was still, even after five years, a pile of rubble.

But there was still the matter of Talon that might be in the city – and, as she had discovered over the last decade, where there was Overwatch, there was Talon, feeding off them from the shadows.

“Now,” she said finally, “Now we start hunting.”

Hana looked up then, face caught somewhere in between eagerness and concern. “I’m the point and shoot type remember? I’m not any good at the sneaking thing.”

Ana’s mouth twisted into a slow smile. “And now you will learn. None of us have only one use, so now we can see what you can really do.” She paused, recalling something that Fareeha had mentioned. “And you are an actress, so I think you are far better at “the sneaking thing” than you give yourself credit for.”

No child of Jack’s would ever be anything less than a terrifying operative. Not if she had anything to say about it.

Ana took the lead this time, telling Hana to stay close and making sure the younger woman had some sort of weapon, even if it was the ridiculously tiny pistol. As soon as possible, Ana was making sure she had enough weapons to defend herself. After all, there were only so many shots available and getting ammunition for anything but the most common of guns in any European country was a pain that she didn’t really want to have to deal with.

Perhaps a revolver, when they returned to Overwatch, but until then, at the very least some sort of blade. 

The Talon base, if it could even be called that, took less than six hours to locate and Ana took them to a hotel that still accepted cash – suspicious and unusual , but still better than leaving even a false credit card for the Reaper’s hacker to track. As it was, perhaps the desk clerk was alerting someone, but it would take a while for the news to filter to Reaper.

Ana, after all, hadn’t been seen in over a decade and no one was going to connect the middle aged dark skinned woman with Ana Amari, hero of Overwatch and Hana was an entirely different person when she wasn’t wearing her signature makeup and flight suit.

Hana studied the bed suspiciously as Ana carefully took out her rifle and began to clean it. She wouldn’t be using it this time, since they would only have two people and she didn’t feel comfortable leaving Hana to attempt to clear the ground on her own, but she cleaned the rifle as often as she could if she’d used it – a habit left over from her few years in the Egyptian army.

Hana apparently found the bed to be acceptable, because she flopped onto it, rolling onto her stomach so that she could see watch what Ana was doing over the older woman’s shoulder. Ana ignored her – Fareeha had done the same, when she was younger, before anger and bitterness had started to grow between them – and continued to carefully clean the gun.

The silence hung in the air between them for several minutes before Hana slid off the bed and came around to settle into a lotus position near Ana. “Do you mind if I use some of your stuff to clean my gun?” She held the weapon up. “It’s been awhile since I’ve cleaned it.”

“Help yourself.” Ana kept an eye on the younger woman as she took out the magazine and then carefully checked the chamber to ensure that the pistol was unloaded before pausing and looking at the disgusting looking carpet.

“Should we put something down?”

Ana shrugged, not taking her attention off of what she was doing. “It is entirely up to you, but if you are careful, there isn’t any need to worry about spilling anything.”

Hana nodded and then began to disassemble her gun, working in silence, beyond asking for some help if she didn’t quite remember how to do something. It was strangely peaceful.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to Skycode for beta reading!

They went back later, after they’d had six hours of sleep – Ana wasn’t going to attempt to sneak into an enemy base exhausted with only an exhausted rookie as backup. Especially not an exhausted rookie that was used to being a tank and not a knife.

The Talon base wasn’t so much a base as a grouping of three old buildings crammed into one of the areas hardest hit by the economic downturns since Overwatch had been dissolved. Ana had decided on a rooftop entry – the roof was most likely the least guarded entry point, since she had yet to hear of Talon employing anyone with flight capabilities and Reaper tended to use the ground level doors just as everyone else did.

She and Hana moved through the buildings – most of the Talon personnel on base seemed to be asleep, since they seemed to mostly operate at night – and encountered no resistance. Ana could feel the aggravation running through her; she didn’t like it when things seemed to go too smoothly because the inevitable screw up was bound to be painful.

But there wasn’t any opposition up until the point that they came to what appeared to be the main office – or it had a desk and laptop and was stuffed with papers. It shouldn’t amuse her that she was surprised that terrorist organizations still dealt with paperwork, but even back during her army days, it had always caught her off guard how… normally most criminal enterprises ran themselves, after you got past the illegal nature of their businesses.

And the opposition itself was only one man, hunched over the laptop, working on something so Ana darted into the room, pulling her knife as she did. The man had less than a second to react before she had gotten behind him and wrapped a hand around his neck, choking back a warning yell as she stabbed her knife right into the base of his skull.

Hana squeaked but hurried into the room, closing the door behind her. “Is this going to help us with whatever you’re looking for?” she hissed, looking pale.

“It might.” Ana answered softly, wondering how many times the younger woman had seen death up close – probably not often, fighting as she did in her MEKA – and shook the thought off. Hana would wind up seeing more death up close tonight. “Lock the door.”

She turned away, already moving to the paper files and leaving Hana to comb through the computer. She’d look through what she could and again – she checked her bag to make the lighter fluid and matches were there – destroy everything else. The two of them could escape in the confusion the fire caused.

She skimmed through the files, glancing over labels and looking for anything that might catch her eye – there wasn’t time to do a full search no matter how much she might wish it – and her fingers paused on a file folder marked only TOP SECRET with the rest of whatever might have been written there either smudged off or blacked out – the file was filthy and this was obviously not its first home.

She slipped the folder into her bag just the doorknob rattled, causing both women to freeze. Hana sent her a panicked glance but Ana kept calm as she doused the rest of the files in the lighter fluid; she’d had Hana lock the door for this reason.

“Manuel, ¿qué está pasando ahí?” The voice on the other side was male and worried – apparently this Manuel wasn’t in the habit of locking or closing his door, because they’d only been in the room for a few minutes.

The rattling became more vigorous as Ana motioned to Hana to grab the laptop, which the younger woman did, slipping it into the same bag as the folders. They could send it to Winston later.

She lit the match as whoever was outside had apparently had enough, because gunshots echoed through the air as he shot the lock, careful to keep the weapon pointed down instead of straight towards the room.

Good if his boss had still been in a position to care.

Bad, because Ana burst through the door and correctly estimated where his waist was as she put three bullets right in his lower intestines and kidney.

He went down with a scream of pain and Ana trusted that Hana would be right behind her, since their cover was well and truly blown. She could only hope that the screaming man and the smoke now billowing out of the office would be enough of a distraction that they’d be able to escape without further incident.

It seemed to be – the guards were all rushing towards the office, voices rising in panic as they noticed the smoke, the injured man, and their boss’s body – and they slipped away easily, leaving Ana feeling somewhat uneasy. She hated it when it seemed like an op should be going _worse_. It usually meant she’d missed something.

*~*~*~*~*~*

Hana was quiet as they walked to the truck and Ana let her be – when she was ready, she’d talk, and trying to force the issue wasn’t going to help. So she focused on getting them down the road before either Talon organized themselves enough to start searching for whoever had broken in or the fire got out of control enough that local authorities were notified.

As much as she might wish for the latter, the former was far more likely.

“Are all your missions like that?”

Ana noticed that the younger woman was shivering and turned up the heat – a blanket and some time to decompress would be ideal but it was fifteen, nearly sixteen hour drive to Zurich and Ana wasn’t going to stop until they had some distance between them and Talon – it would only take one decent description to have Reaper on her trail and if that happened she wanted as much distance between her and where Reaper would start looking as possible.

“No.” She answered, not taking her eye off the road. “Most of them are boring. Me in my nest, waiting for the target for hours or maybe days. One time it was weeks.”

Hana made a small noise and she continued. “It helps, killing them from a distance. It’s like they’re not really people that way.” She paused, wished that Gabriel was here to give this talk. He was always the best at it. “But up close, that’s different. It’s messy and you have to watch it happen and you can’t avoid what you did.”

Normally Gabriel gave this speech after a rough mission, when a recruit might have either killed for the first time – or killed a human for the first time, because despite the fact that Omnics might be equal under the law, killing another human always seemed to take a bigger toll than killing an Omnic.

But there was only Ana and a nineteen year old that had probably never so much as shot her pistol at a human being before.

“How do you get over that?” Hana was still shivering, but her color was returning. “I didn’t even touch him and all I can see is the look on his face as you stabbed him.”

Ana took a breath. This was a time for honesty. “I do not.” She finally turned enough to look at the younger woman, trusting that the road was clear for now. “I carry the death of every person – Omnic or human – that I have killed with me and some deaths rest lighter than others.”

Hana’s shivering was slowing, even out as she came down from the adrenaline rush. “How much do those deaths weigh?”

The two men at the warehouse – Ana was not so foolish to think the man she had shot might have survived. She took her time answering. “Heavier than some” The child trafficker in Cambodia, for example. He had been a pleasure to kill. “Lighter than others.” The Omnics that had never had a chance of resisting the God Programs that turned them against their friends and neighbors.

“Oh.” Hana pulled her legs up against her chest but didn’t say anything else and Ana didn’t push. That was Jack’s role – the one that would push and push until people opened up. They usually felt better after, but she’d be lying if she didn’t know it made them hate Jack, just a little, while it was happening.

“Try and get some rest.” She said finally. “It is a long ride to Zürich.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feedback is always appreciated!


	5. Chapter 5

When they arrived in Zurich several hours later, Ana checked them into a hotel, using an identity that she hadn’t used since she was in the Egyptian army – Salma Amasi had been created for a single undercover operation and then discarded, and she was hoping that it would raise no flags now.

Hana was asleep almost immediately, leaving Ana to go over the medical files they had taken. She hoped that they chaos they had caused on the base would leave Talon guessing as to what they had wanted.

As it was, the files were obviously stolen; she recognized Hannah’s messy handwriting but some of them…. She examined them more closely, looking for some sort of identifier, even if it was just a signature. Hannah had been there from the very beginning until she turned the medical wing over to Angela about two years before Ana left.

About the same time the genetic testing had stopped, now that she was thinking of the timeline.

But… She narrowed her eyes at the faint watermark on some of the papers and got up to retrieve her scope, holding it carefully over the marking until it solidified into something she could see, if not identify. She slowly copied it down, double checking several times to ensure that she had it correct before setting the scope to the side.

It… it was familiar and she tapped her fingers on the hotel desk in frustration, racking her brain to try and remember _why_. There had been many symbols from many organizations since the start of Overwatch and to not immediately recognize this one was understandable. Annoying, but understandable.

For an instant, she considered calling Jack or…. She hesitated for a long moment, mind instantly reaching for Gabrielle before discarding it. Gabrielle had turned Overwatch over to the three of them before vanishing into obscurity.

_“I don’t want you calling me,” she said sternly, light blue eyes paling into chips of ice as she stared them down. “I’ve given my recommendations to the UN and I’m done.”_

_Ana straightened as the older woman focused on her. “You three are one of the best teams I’ve ever trained up and as long as you manage to stick together, you’ll be able to handle anything that anyone will throw at you.”_

_Gabriel grunted, crossing his arms over his chest and had said nothing. He’d never really gotten along with Gabrielle but that was more personal, as far as Ana had ever been able to figure out, and hadn’t really affected their working relationship._

_Jack looked the most lost – Ana knew that Gabrielle was the one to personally recruit him and that he considered the older woman to be something of a maternal figure, so being told to not contact her had to have come as an unpleasant surprise._

_Gabrielle’s eyes softened again when she looked at him and shoved a lock of red hair streaked with white out of her eyes. “I’m tired. I’ve given more to this organization than they’ve ever had a right to ask and I want this to be done with.”_

_Gabriel’s eyes sharpened and Ana straightened up as well at the strange sentence. What had the UN demanded, that would clearly drive away the woman that had dreamed Overwatch into being?_

_Gabrielle ignored them. “They might ask the same of you, one day.” She hesitated for a moment, as though wanting to say something else, but shook her head. “You’ll know your limits. Try not to hit them,” A wry smile. “You might not like the results all that much.”_

Ana frowned, wondering why the memory had come now – Gabrielle departed the next day and the only thing she’d left behind had been a ten digit number and a set of keys. Most of the keys were for the locks on the office… but one…. Ana straightened.

One had been useless.

Or, at the very least, fit none of the keys on the base. She, Jack, and Gabriel made a game of attempting to discover which lock the key fit in, but never managed it – after a few years, the game had fallen by the wayside as they were given more responsibilities. She couldn’t even remember who had the key last. Surely Jack or Gabriel.

She slumped back down – the key was most likely just a key, completely irrelevant to the matter at hand, but the memory it had recalled was not. Something made Gabrielle decide to leave the organization – Ana narrowed her eyes – but what?

She shook her head, going back to the original mystery she had – Gabrielle’s could wait – what organization used that particular symbol? It was a globe, with two bundles of arrows on either side. Both generic enough, but combined with the rope that circled one bundle of arrows, looped around the globe before circling the other bundle… that was unique, she should remember it. And yet….

She took a closer look at the sheets of paper – they belonged an unknown male, with no name or even an identifier used. Perhaps not even Talon realized what they had held. She read more, flipping from one page to the next, her disbelief and an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach growing as she read more about the tests he had been subjected to and the injuries he sustained.

Ten pages. That was all she had been able to find, but it was ten pages more than she had ever wanted to know about what lengths that whoever this was was willing to go to in order to have something to defeat the Omnics.

(To be fair, she knew that the Egyptian military had utilized several similar programs, though she had not been involved – she needed no enhancements in order to be a sniper, her many, many national and international medals a testament to her skills without them)

The military.

She stared at the wall, letting her mind wander as she tried to remember – several countries had developed programs designed to enhance their soldiers into something that could fight Omnics without using the newly developed nanotechnology that might leave them vulnerable to takeover by one of the God Programs.

Eventually, most of the survivors of those programs had wound up at Overwatch, looking for something to do. And Overwatch took them in, needing all of the help they could get, at least until the Omnic Crisis was over. Even then, most members were simply shuffled over into the reserves, where they could be called on in times of great need or released back to their parent country’s military.

In the beginning, well over three quarters of Overwatch had been made up of enhanced soldiers.

By the end, it had been less than a fifth, with ordinary soldiers and mercenaries making up the rest.

Ana placed the papers back into the folder she’d pulled them out of and slipped them into Hana’s backpack. There wasn’t any point in rereading them and trying to force the memory of the symbol wouldn’t help her – so she would sleep and hopefully the answer would be clearer in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you think!

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you think!


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